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Pipeline battles could further hostility between Indigenous Peoples and RCMP

It’s no secret that Canada’s Indigenous Peoples and the RCMP have a fraught relationship. Especially in the West where the Red Coats played a key role in subduing and controlling Indigenous People so vast forests and prairie could be opened up for settlers.

Of course this is what the federal governments of the time directed them to do.

But this is not just a matter of shameful history.

Nowhere is that more obvious than in the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. RCMP detachments across the country come in for particular scorn for failing to take seriously the disappearance of Indigenous females when reported by their families or other community members.

As construction proceeds on the Trans Mountain and Coastal GasLink pipelines through B.C., pipelines that are staunchly opposed by some Indigenous groups led by determined women, I can’t help but wonder how this long-standing hostility towards the RCMP will play out if they are called in to quell blockades or attacks on the construction sites.

Whatever happens, long-simmering resentments are bound to be part of the mix.

According to witnesses who testified at the MMIWG Inquiry, RCMP staff and officers were either indifferent or insulting when family members reported that a mother, sister, daughter or friend was missing. Many of the missing were characterized as “drunks” or “runaways out partying” or “prostitutes unworthy of follow-up.”

Families often took to conducting their own searches when RCMP took no notice or delayed an investigation.

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RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki offered an apology for that behaviour during the hearings.

“I am sorry that for too many of you the RCMP was not the police force you needed it to be during this terrible time in your life,” she said.

Bu the inquiry’s final report slammed the RCMP anyway: “The historic and present-day role of the RCMP, the continued racism and sexism by many RCMP officers directed at Indigenous Peoples, the high rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people, and lack of resolve have caused many Indigenous Peoples and communities to lose trust and confidence in the Canadian justice system, the RCMP, and police services in general.”

The inquiry also found that municipal and regional police forces were much more co-operative about releasing documents than the RCMP. Some of the files turned over by the federal Department of Justice were so redacted they were unintelligible

This lack of trust really matters. The Mounties police 40 per cent of the Indigenous population and were involved in 39 per cent of the unsolved missing and murdered cases.

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If you don’t live in a small, remote community policed by the RCMP, it can be hard to imagine how powerful they are.

I remember investigating the death of a Blackfoot man on a reserve east of Calgary who had been run over by an RCMP vehicle. When an inquest was eventually called, the coroner arrived from Calgary and was escorted to the small courthouse in the town bordering the reserve by none other than the head of the local RCMP detachment.

For relatives of the deceased any hope of an impartial inquest was immediately snuffed out.

In another case, three Indigenous men died while in the custody of the RCMP in a remote detachment northwest of Edmonton. When I went there as a newspaper reporter to inquire about what had happened, the RCMP officer in charge simply refused to talk to me.

When you combine these sorts of incidents with the fact that the RCMP often collected and herded Indigenous children into residential schools, and forced Indigenous people back into tuberculosis sanatoriums if they left to return home, which was usually hundreds of miles away, it’s not difficult to understand why there are such long-simmering resentments against them.

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